And God looked upon the Earth and saw mankind saying they could change the climate He had made and He laughed. He watched a chosen few of several thousand gather at Copenhagen. He saw they were followed by hippies shouting that mankind had taken the power from God to make the climate warmer. They enjoyed each others company and feasted well together. And God felt excluded. To make the point that he still holds the climate in his own hands and messes with it at his own will, often just for fun, he dropped 8 inches of snow on Britain causing travel mayhem. He said, “you want cold, try this”, but mankind took no notice. Still they talked of man's power over the climate so he sent a great chill across Europe, sent wind that stopped the cross channel ferries and turned off the power to trains in the Channel Tunnel. And God said unto the peoples of the Earth, now do you get it?
And Lo, the peoples of they Earth began scattering until only a few were left. And those few set about trying to inflict unilateral economic disarmament on the parts of the world that could still afford to see their children fed by having them send all the money that was left after the Great Post Millennial Recession to the parts of the world where they had no way of paying that money back other that to give their own children, their own flesh and blood, into slavery.
Now displeased, God sent plagues of pestilence and famine that the people blamed on each other instead of praying for forgiveness. God watched as that led to war and degradation of the environment he had made for man to live in.
And he sat with his head in his hands and said, “They just don’t get it, do they?”
Saturday 19 December 2009
Saturday 12 December 2009
How to have a landslide win - or loss.
Labour talked back in 1997 that we could import everything we needed using the money from the City of London so we no longer need farming or manufacturing. The war against farming was done in relative openness but the war against manufacturing and any other industry was kept in the dark.
Company profits have been squeezed for such a long time now that employers no longer do training. Prospective workers have to get college qualifications or degrees at their own expense, thus excluding the poor from bettering themselves and exacerbating the divide between the have and the have nots. Hence large swathes of the electorate are shut out of the job market and are sick of hearing Brown say he is doing all he can to get people back to work, thus shutting out all who have never been in work. That would be around 20 million voters with no experience to put on their CV and no chance of getting to interview stages in any job application.
So why would his saying he is redirecting overseas aid to combating climate change strike any chords with that 20 million? I mean, whose money is he throwing away now? There is no reason those who have never had the chance to pay tax should care about his spending and it is therefore irrelevant as an election issue.
There are jobs, we see people working. But the young British born and educated male cannot get into those positions and be part of a community. We need to see how those who are in work got the jobs offers, how they found out about openings and got invited to take up work there. Obviously the notice boards in the Polish community places, like churches, are written in Polish and so exclude all who did not learn that language in school or at home. Likewise Gujerati, Urdu, Ukrainian, Russian – we do not teach those languages in school here in the UK. Modern language departments in state comprehensives are in decline now that foreign languages are no longer compulsory and are thought to be hard, and tend not to teach languages other than French and German, or Spanish, for lack of teachers and exam markers. Nepotism is the norm in most cultures, looking after one’s own is a normal human thing to do. But it excludes outsiders, in this case culturally British people. This is what the BNP are seeing and working on to make progress in the polls.
The workless do not see the mass exodus of the manufacturing wealth creation base of Britain as the fault of government because nobody has told them, or shown them that is what happened. But shown that foreigners are taking jobs here is easy to understand. Unless Labour comes clean about what they have done they will lose voters to the BNP, as will other parties.
The Conservative Party needs to find a way of telling these truths in the language of the target audience, the words they use, in ways that chime in with the world they live in and experiences they recognise. That is the language of the state comprehensive, of the streets and of the X Factor – the language that might not be learned at Eton though it seems to have been taught in the scholarship funded selective public school our Glaswegian Prime Minister attended.
Labour got their message across in the late 1990’s. Now the Conservative Party must do the same only better. But to whom are the target audience listening. We must assume that a third of them have left school unable to be reading it.
Company profits have been squeezed for such a long time now that employers no longer do training. Prospective workers have to get college qualifications or degrees at their own expense, thus excluding the poor from bettering themselves and exacerbating the divide between the have and the have nots. Hence large swathes of the electorate are shut out of the job market and are sick of hearing Brown say he is doing all he can to get people back to work, thus shutting out all who have never been in work. That would be around 20 million voters with no experience to put on their CV and no chance of getting to interview stages in any job application.
So why would his saying he is redirecting overseas aid to combating climate change strike any chords with that 20 million? I mean, whose money is he throwing away now? There is no reason those who have never had the chance to pay tax should care about his spending and it is therefore irrelevant as an election issue.
There are jobs, we see people working. But the young British born and educated male cannot get into those positions and be part of a community. We need to see how those who are in work got the jobs offers, how they found out about openings and got invited to take up work there. Obviously the notice boards in the Polish community places, like churches, are written in Polish and so exclude all who did not learn that language in school or at home. Likewise Gujerati, Urdu, Ukrainian, Russian – we do not teach those languages in school here in the UK. Modern language departments in state comprehensives are in decline now that foreign languages are no longer compulsory and are thought to be hard, and tend not to teach languages other than French and German, or Spanish, for lack of teachers and exam markers. Nepotism is the norm in most cultures, looking after one’s own is a normal human thing to do. But it excludes outsiders, in this case culturally British people. This is what the BNP are seeing and working on to make progress in the polls.
The workless do not see the mass exodus of the manufacturing wealth creation base of Britain as the fault of government because nobody has told them, or shown them that is what happened. But shown that foreigners are taking jobs here is easy to understand. Unless Labour comes clean about what they have done they will lose voters to the BNP, as will other parties.
The Conservative Party needs to find a way of telling these truths in the language of the target audience, the words they use, in ways that chime in with the world they live in and experiences they recognise. That is the language of the state comprehensive, of the streets and of the X Factor – the language that might not be learned at Eton though it seems to have been taught in the scholarship funded selective public school our Glaswegian Prime Minister attended.
Labour got their message across in the late 1990’s. Now the Conservative Party must do the same only better. But to whom are the target audience listening. We must assume that a third of them have left school unable to be reading it.
Monday 7 December 2009
Garden design problems
A friend is always helping other people, never himself. Someone sends him a fax or phones him asking can he give up three days a week for six months as a voluntary helper running a mass attendance sporting event and he says, yes, I can do that. No pay, no problem. So his own home gets a bit neglected. I noticed his garden was ten feet deep in brambles and chose to do something about it, motivating him by saying he could use it for the benefit of others when it is finished and tidy.
I started with a plan and set about rooting some cuttings of low maintenance plants that would do well in a garden that appeared to be of plateau gravel topped with a thin layer of London clay. One row of Leylandii trees had been removed and another was due to go so the land was exceedingly dry and I thought my assessment of substrate and top soil was correct – a dry garden.
It was to have a hedge across the bottom of assorted evergreen shrubs with hebes, rosemary and lavender to the front and tall red tulips interspersed for Springtime focus. The backing shrubs, escalonia that has small flowers in deep pink and a tall spiky plant that has sprays of tiny white flowers followed by orange berries. This, along with the small leaved hebes, would give it distance and the greens would change like the banks of a river appear to change as you slip by in a rowing boat. It would also be very low maintenance to fit the requirements of a man who would rather not be maintaining his own garden.
To the right I envisaged planting a row of evergreen rosa rugosa that would flower in pink to pick up the dotty pink or red from the high lower border.
To the left I saw only brambles, and a few self seeded plum stalks around an apple tree then being strangled by ivy. The sun bakes the south facing garden and I guessed that side would be dry – a row of silver leaved senecio would do nicely there if he could be persuaded to cut across the top of it with his electric hedge trimmer once a year. Grey green to the right, three feet high; assorted green with red and pink dots to the back; and dingy green with dull pink to the right – it would look fantastic if he once again mowed the lawn in the middle as he had before the brambles took over the ground and other people took over his spare time. I ordered masses of weed suppressant fabric to cover each patch of ground I exposed to stop the weeds coming back with pegs to hold it down. Not enough pegs – I frequently had to go for more.
I set about with this image in mind. Chopping the brambles was hot work but good balance exercise for my wobbly legs. Snipping up the lengths of stem was simple while were still fresh and soft, and gathering all the bits onto a cleared area that needed more height was easy with a rake.
And that was where the trouble started.
I wrenched at a roll of prickly stems, now reduced from ten feet to four. It stuck and I pulled harder. The roots of the brambles came out of good black soil like string out of honey right across to the fence on the other side. Not London clay and not dry. However, the brambles grew over my head as I thought about that so back to chopping I went. At the right hand fence I found the remains of an old fence piled up on top of and among faded children’s toys and garden rubbish. Rolling that away I found the base of the bramble den and tugged them out, returning to rescuing other areas of land from ivy that was rooted under the fence pieces. Baby frogs grunted their despair as I covered the land with black stuff and I spent hours catching them up and returning them to an old pond I had exposed near the house. They spent the time hopping back again until I came across their mother and caught her up. While I went on another tea break in the shade the frogs all hopped back onto the black stuff and tried to make holes in it. They were not on my side. They had their own agenda and ran an organised campaign.
Eventually the whole area was clear and mostly covered in black fabric, lumps appeared and fell back as brambles tried to see the sun again. I snipped them as they emerged from frog splittings and pinned the gaps over assiduously.
Months later the time for planting happened, though the 1970’s trailing ivy eating the garage roof was still thriving in spite of having been sprayed with the most evil bad plant killing stuff I could buy.
Throwing the pointy-ended pickaxe into the soil as it trying to make a hole in gravel worked better than expected and the right hand side was soon being planted with seneccio – far too easily. That soil was not the dry thin clay that seneccio would love, it was black rich soil wringing wet as if over the leaking water main!
I explored. The neighbouring garden was a few feet higher and their greenhouse was next to the wet area so it was assumed that he was watering with a leaking system. Wrong.
He was not.
I had found one more of the natural springs that are common high on plateau gravel. The springs that came up and vanished and are the bane of local water suppliers who keep being called out on reports of burst water mains when the road is flooding only to find after much digging that their water main is fine. The springs that make sloping roads into ice rinks in winter. But this one was round the back and was about to kill my chosen plants with root rot.
I suggested hydrangea but the man who owns the garden does not like them. I suggested Kniphofia (red hot pokers) but he does not like those either.
I suspect that part of the garden might end up as a water feature.
Further research suggests that land now part of a housing estate was the orchards and vegetable gardens of the gardener of a big estate whose mansion and stable block is now a large school for boys. Obviously the gardener used the stable manure on his own patch and with gusto. Brilliant soil that would grow anything bigger and better than anywhere else around and he just wants a low maintenance border. But of what? Bamboo would be even more uncontrollably invasive as the brambles I spent months fighting.
I think it might be box, buxus buxus. Too bright, too short, and too dark.
Garden design was never meant to be easy.
I started with a plan and set about rooting some cuttings of low maintenance plants that would do well in a garden that appeared to be of plateau gravel topped with a thin layer of London clay. One row of Leylandii trees had been removed and another was due to go so the land was exceedingly dry and I thought my assessment of substrate and top soil was correct – a dry garden.
It was to have a hedge across the bottom of assorted evergreen shrubs with hebes, rosemary and lavender to the front and tall red tulips interspersed for Springtime focus. The backing shrubs, escalonia that has small flowers in deep pink and a tall spiky plant that has sprays of tiny white flowers followed by orange berries. This, along with the small leaved hebes, would give it distance and the greens would change like the banks of a river appear to change as you slip by in a rowing boat. It would also be very low maintenance to fit the requirements of a man who would rather not be maintaining his own garden.
To the right I envisaged planting a row of evergreen rosa rugosa that would flower in pink to pick up the dotty pink or red from the high lower border.
To the left I saw only brambles, and a few self seeded plum stalks around an apple tree then being strangled by ivy. The sun bakes the south facing garden and I guessed that side would be dry – a row of silver leaved senecio would do nicely there if he could be persuaded to cut across the top of it with his electric hedge trimmer once a year. Grey green to the right, three feet high; assorted green with red and pink dots to the back; and dingy green with dull pink to the right – it would look fantastic if he once again mowed the lawn in the middle as he had before the brambles took over the ground and other people took over his spare time. I ordered masses of weed suppressant fabric to cover each patch of ground I exposed to stop the weeds coming back with pegs to hold it down. Not enough pegs – I frequently had to go for more.
I set about with this image in mind. Chopping the brambles was hot work but good balance exercise for my wobbly legs. Snipping up the lengths of stem was simple while were still fresh and soft, and gathering all the bits onto a cleared area that needed more height was easy with a rake.
And that was where the trouble started.
I wrenched at a roll of prickly stems, now reduced from ten feet to four. It stuck and I pulled harder. The roots of the brambles came out of good black soil like string out of honey right across to the fence on the other side. Not London clay and not dry. However, the brambles grew over my head as I thought about that so back to chopping I went. At the right hand fence I found the remains of an old fence piled up on top of and among faded children’s toys and garden rubbish. Rolling that away I found the base of the bramble den and tugged them out, returning to rescuing other areas of land from ivy that was rooted under the fence pieces. Baby frogs grunted their despair as I covered the land with black stuff and I spent hours catching them up and returning them to an old pond I had exposed near the house. They spent the time hopping back again until I came across their mother and caught her up. While I went on another tea break in the shade the frogs all hopped back onto the black stuff and tried to make holes in it. They were not on my side. They had their own agenda and ran an organised campaign.
Eventually the whole area was clear and mostly covered in black fabric, lumps appeared and fell back as brambles tried to see the sun again. I snipped them as they emerged from frog splittings and pinned the gaps over assiduously.
Months later the time for planting happened, though the 1970’s trailing ivy eating the garage roof was still thriving in spite of having been sprayed with the most evil bad plant killing stuff I could buy.
Throwing the pointy-ended pickaxe into the soil as it trying to make a hole in gravel worked better than expected and the right hand side was soon being planted with seneccio – far too easily. That soil was not the dry thin clay that seneccio would love, it was black rich soil wringing wet as if over the leaking water main!
I explored. The neighbouring garden was a few feet higher and their greenhouse was next to the wet area so it was assumed that he was watering with a leaking system. Wrong.
He was not.
I had found one more of the natural springs that are common high on plateau gravel. The springs that came up and vanished and are the bane of local water suppliers who keep being called out on reports of burst water mains when the road is flooding only to find after much digging that their water main is fine. The springs that make sloping roads into ice rinks in winter. But this one was round the back and was about to kill my chosen plants with root rot.
I suggested hydrangea but the man who owns the garden does not like them. I suggested Kniphofia (red hot pokers) but he does not like those either.
I suspect that part of the garden might end up as a water feature.
Further research suggests that land now part of a housing estate was the orchards and vegetable gardens of the gardener of a big estate whose mansion and stable block is now a large school for boys. Obviously the gardener used the stable manure on his own patch and with gusto. Brilliant soil that would grow anything bigger and better than anywhere else around and he just wants a low maintenance border. But of what? Bamboo would be even more uncontrollably invasive as the brambles I spent months fighting.
I think it might be box, buxus buxus. Too bright, too short, and too dark.
Garden design was never meant to be easy.
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